Well said. This is why I asked the poster what he meant by weaknesses? If it doesn’t do what a Mac does, then buy a Mac. To me it’s similar to a person buying a Toyota Corolla for 25k and wanting it to have all the features and fit and finish of an 60k luxury car. Ain’t going to happen.
Your use of “cromulent” embiggens my respect.
The problem is as always that people assume the iPad needs to “replace” a Mac. This is simply not true.
It doesn’t have to be able to do all the things a Mac can do. Apple has never once suggested it should replace a Mac.
The cognitive dissonance with self identified “power users” that seem to believe they are representative of all users is endlessly frustrating.
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Personally, I would love to do things I do on my Macs on my iPads. I can’t because the file system, or lack thereof. So sure it’s a computer, I just find it to be a very limited one.
Same here. I just don’t find an iPad very useful for what I do. But I assume that people buy expensive iPad Pros to do things they can’t do on a Mac, just like I buy a Mac to do things I can’t do (or can’t do well) on an iPad.
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Apple won’t fix a problem with iPadOS because in their eyes…there’s nothing to fix. It keeps getting paraded based on the last ads, for video creators, musicians, students.
I have an M1 iPad Pro, it’s showing how sluggish it is…but no desire to spend $$$ on a new one. I use it mainly for taking notes, Obsidian, Craft, and serves as entertainment when traveling.
I have the last iPad Mini (which is more important for me), I use it to deliver my talks from, do some light reading on it if I don’t have a book, and take notes.
My main day to day is my Mac Mini…I would mind getting a MacBook Pro, I used to have one, but then my next problem would keep both computers in sync.
The one thing that my Mac Mini can do that my iPad can’t do…is that when I download audio files, to be able to change the metadata. Or when people send me audio, and I need to make an update or add metadata…it’s just faster on a mac.
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A well configured new 13" iPad Pro is as expensive as a good Mac (relative to configurations of course) so I don’t think your comparison is necessarily accurate.
By weaknesses, I mean the friction encountered when doing things which are easier to do on the Mac. In my “ideal” world, I want the form, weight, outstanding screen, cellular, pencil, and modal flexibility of the iPad with the OS chops of the MacOS. I would love to have an Apple version of the Surface Pro. That means one device to purchase and manage capable of serving as a laptop and tablet. This would not be ideal for Apple, but for many Apple customers, it would be ideal if done well.
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I found the below linked thread interesting. Roon is a music library/streaming service that people (audiophiles) use. It requires a computer, and many people devote a computer for the sole purpose of running it. Mac Minis work, but people often use mini PCs to run it as a dedicated server. That the question came up, and then reading the responses, it is interesting see how other communities see the iPad.
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A more apt comparison might be people who get a Mustang or a Charger and want it to have the off-road capabilities of a Raptor or Rubicon (yes, people actually do this).
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Mustang or a Charger
I assume they are the “iPads” of vehicles? 
Would you consider a Surface Pro if Qualcomm’s claims that their new chip is competitive with the M3 are correct?
As a surface pro owner, as well as a MacBook Pro and iPad Pro owner, I can tell you that the compromises made for touch screen windows mean that the device is neither as good as a dedicated tablet nor a dedicated laptop.
And for this reason, I never want the iPad to run macOS.
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Same for me — that would be an instant-buy for me. I wonder if they would ever do this though, because that could take a huge chunk of out sales. Although, arguing against myself, Apple has been known to cannibalize their own product lines, so who knows?
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Ahh, but the issue here is that we would hope Apple does it better (which they often do). I am completely confident that if Apple chose to make a Surface competitor, they could do it well. I think you’d have solid battery life docked/undocked, great interface, and seamless transitions between the two.
I don’t think it’s fair to say the Surface isn’t great therefore an Apple version wouldn’t be great.
That’s a very interesting point. I’ve heard people say that the Surface Pro is great as a laptop and just okay as a tablet. And the iPad is great as a tablet and mediocre as a laptop. So it may be that the OS has to be optimized for one or the other.
OTOH, some of what people say the want to make iPads more like Macs are things like full access to the file system and a more powerful Files app, which could still be touch interactive.
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I’ve used the iPad off and on as my primary computer for the past 7 years or so, and the software has definitely gotten much more capable over that time. And if I had to choose just one, I would choose the iPad over the Mac in a heartbeat, because there are so many things that I consider essential to my professional life that the iPad allows me to do and that I simply cannot do on my Mac, most of them involving the Apple Pencil. YMMV, of course, as what’s true of my profession (a college professor in the humanities) may very well not be true of yours. That said, I have the good blessing to be able to have both an iPad and a Mac (a Mac Mini, specifically), and I do use the Mac for a good number of things simply because there are fewer hoops to jump through or the tasks are easier to accomplish there.
I’ll put a stake in the ground and give a list of a few things that I think could help the software story on the iPad:
- Background refresh of apps. One frustration I regularly run into with the iPad is that apps (usually third-party apps) only sync when they are opened. This is the equivalent on the Mac of the app being the front-most, active app. Imagine if Things or OmniFocus only synced the item you had checked off on your phone if you made the app the front-most app on your Mac! And yet that’s what’s the case on the iPad. As Stephen pointed out on this week’s episode, you can really feel the roots of the iPhone at times on the iPad, with memory being treated as a precious resource. Given that the iPads increasingly have more memory, it’d be nice if they could hold more apps in memory and keep them synced in the background.
- The equivalent of menu bar apps. The iPad is really missing these sorts of utility apps that can run quietly in the background and do all sorts of things for you: clipboard managers, Hazel-like file managers, and the like. Maybe put them in Control Center?
- Direct interactions between apps, with permission. I don’t think Apple will ever do away with sandboxing, but it’d be nice if they allowed for more avenues for interaction between apps, without the glue of Shortcuts. One of the things I still have to turn to my Mac for is using Zotero as a plug-in to put citations into a Word document and then automatically building the bibliography. That sort of interaction just isn’t possible on the iPad, and that’s just one exmaple of many.
- Improve Safari and the rendering engine. This is better than it once was, but it’s still not the same as it is on the Mac. There should be no daylight between iPad and Mac when you’re using Safari with a keyboard and mouse/trackpad attached. (I do understand that a touch-only interface adds in complexity on this front.)
Will we get any of this at WWDC? Improvements to Safari are the most likely; the others I’m much less optimistic about, but I’d be glad to be surprised!
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I think this will eventually arrive as a touch Macbook Air. OLED is inevitable on laptops and Apple Silicon makes cellular easy. The Pencil mitigates some of the ergonomic problem touching a laptop.
A Macbook Air is lighter than the new iPad Pro + Magic Keyboard or a Surface Pro X + keyboard. It’s always going to be like that because a laptop can put all its weight in the case and a detachable tablet has to put the computer and battery in the screen, and then still needs some weight and/or stands to keep it balanced on a keyboard.
There’s no single device Microsoft or Apple can sell that lets people do their best work/have the most fun, with the most comfort, in each form factor. Microsoft doesn’t care about the tradeoffs, Apple does.
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Apple hasn’t published a weight for the new Magic Keyboard, but they have said that it’s lighter than the old one. That could be some tiny amount (1 gram lighter and Apple would still say “the lightest ever”), but it’s definitely not any heavier. The old Magic Keyboard for the 12.9” is 1.52lbs. The new 13” iPad Pro is 1.28lbs. So the new keyboard + iPad combo is no more than 2.8lbs. A MacBook Air is 2.7lbs. That’s a pretty indistinguishable difference. And that’s the worst case scenario.
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But how much does the larger iPad Pro/keyboard combo weigh and how thick is it? That’s more directly comparable to the MacBook Air 13 in screen size.
The figures I quoted are for the 13” iPad Pro.
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That’s a good point, Chris. There’s more to the MBA case (larger surface area, bigger battery, more connectors etc.) so the weight distribution makes it more stable, but from the perspective of an iPad user who doesn’t want to have to buy a laptop, those might not be big deals.